First experiences with Wallabag
by mafty — Fri 30 December 2022
The problem
For years, the way I manage my digital read-it-later is really scattered:
- save to some random
read-later.org
with org-capture, but seldom visit the actual file - send to my saved messages in telegram so that I could pick them up from my computer, but I've rarely remembered it
- save several pages in a qutebrowser session
- add them to bookmark bar in firefox
- …
All of them work to some degree, but cannot be glued together easily.
And there is a solution
Several days ago, I decided to switch to a centralized scheme: wallabag. Wallabag is a self hostable application <sup><a id="fnr.1" class="footref" href="#fn.1" role="doc-backlink">1</a></sup> for saving web page, and works on the web, on android and on iOS. More importantly, it has a command-line client and a Emacs client <sup><a id="fnr.2" class="footref" href="#fn.2" role="doc-backlink">2</a></sup>.
A robust cli interface enables adding webpage to wallabag using muscle memory: it suffices to add a keybinding to my qutebrowser config:
# wallabag integration
config.bind(',w', 'spawn -v -m wallabag add {url}')
Conclusion
Wallabag does a great job reducing the mental pressure in the overall workflow, but after all the task of managing read-it-later requires self-discipline.
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Footnotes
<sup><a id="fn.1" href="#fnr.1">1</a></sup> Due to lack of familiarity with the php toolchain, I'm currently using the official instance rather than a self-hosted one.
<sup><a id="fn.2" href="#fnr.2">2</a></sup> Sadly, I haven't got it working yet.